It’s Die Hard 10 or X-Men 12 and John McClane or Wolverine are in the boardroom with a group of frightened executives when the call comes through. “Do as we say,” says a sinister voice, “or we print your emails, one by one!” The executives look to the unkillable cop or the mutant superhero for

Whatever Malala says, the six men who murdered the children and staff of the Army Public School in Peshawar yesterday were not, in any conventional sense, cowards. As they set about the task of shooting all those boys and girls, they will have expected that this was their last act in this life and

There was a big row about a little hospital yesterday. The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, complained angrily to the Speaker that the deputy prime minister had just misled the House. It was not true, he said, that Hinchingbrooke — the first (and so far, only) NHS hospital to be privately

Many of us never quite let go of the wet-weekend idea of a museum. You’re ten, you went to the zoo last week, so a despairing parent takes you and the sib to see the mummies, the tanks or dinosaur bones. It didn’t really much matter to you back then exactly what was in the miles of cases and on the

Ages ago I went to a performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue — located somewhere between what is now the Gielgud but was then the Globe, and what was, is and has eternally and unchangingly been the Scotch Steak House. What was remarkable about this

So strange have things become that I am thinking of renaming this column Chronicles of an Age of Confusion. And of all the morbid symptoms of our current distemper few have been as mis-diagnosed as the Thornberry case. You could tell it was mad from an interview given by Lucy Powell, Ed Miliband’s

For a month I have been followed around by a total body arc trainer. And now I’m terrified. The haunting began when I searched online for something energetic to go in the shed and help me to take off what I have most unwisely put on. I browsed a product or two on Amazon — may even have put one in

It’s 2014. And this week that part of the world that could bear to look at such a thing watched on video as 18 men were decapitated by 18 others, using only small knives. I have read descriptions of the mass execution outside the Syrian town of Dabiq, but as I won’t watch I can only imagine the

How conspiracy theories happen, part 117. The weekend before last the players of Tottenham Hotspur FC treated their despairing fans, including me, to a dreadful home defeat at the hands of Stoke City. As the final whistle blew two things happened: some fans booed and the stadium sound system began

The crystal ball is cracked. With 174 days until the next election, if you want to know the result in advance and who will govern us in May, my best advice is to take your guinea pig out of its straw and — holding the rodent firmly in one hand — examine the spoor in its cage for omens. Or, if you